Mehdi Benchoula with his wife Liana Grossman and their two children Alex, 9, and Mia, 5.

“I think we belong to what we call the in between culture,”
says Mehdi Benchoula, a Parisian with Algerian heritage. With his
wife Liana Grossman, who moved from the Ukraine to Israel as a child
before immigrating to England, the pair are associated with so many
cultures that they no longer identify with any of them.

Liana: I had a lot of conflict about it for many years, but
now I am just proud and happy that I am an international person. I’m
all over the place. My husband is half Muslim and I’m Jewish plus
Russian and Israeli. So I can’t identify myself with anything
anymore.

Mehdi: In France I found it difficult to belong to the French
culture, or the Algerian culture. In England it is the same thing
because I am an immigrant I don’t feel like I belong completely to
the British culture. We find the more we travel, the more we find it
difficult to belong to one culture. I don’t identify myself with
any of them.

Mehdi and Liana, who are both French and Spanish teachers, moved
to England to study in 2002 and met three years later in a cultural
studies lecture. When they first moved to London, neither had any
intention of staying as long as they have.

“I just kind of went with the flow, you know? I wasn’t even
planning to do a degree but I got bored and I just decided to do one
and then I got ambitious and started working, then kids,” says
Liana. “I didn’t expect to stay here so long.”

Although they have spent over a decade and a half in London, they
still don’t consider England they’re home. “For me England was
always a place that people come and go all the time,” says Liana.
“I don’t feel very patriotic here.” But Mehdi says he would
identify as a Londoner “more than a Parisian, for example”. “We
love London, we really do,” adds Liana, who describes their feeling
towards the city as “love and hate”.

“With the weather and the food compared to France, we have a lot
of complaints, but we still love it because we have the chance to go
out and be spontaneous with new people continuously, which is great,”
she says. “And I feel that we are so lucky to have so many friends
from different countries. It’s great, really nice.”

Even so the couple are moving with their children, Alex, 9, and
Mia, 5, to live in Thailand for at least three years to continue
discovering new cultures.

Liana: Because then we can travel. Mehdi always wanted to go
to Japan, and I wanted to go to China. And with four kids it would be
difficult, but from there it is much easier.